Secrets of the City

No nod to the original author here eh? I mean I can read the destination link but don’t these types of things usually get a “via” or something?

My bad. You’re absolutely right — though the link is certainly a nod. Corrected!

I am pretty indifferent about the extra pages but I think that they are another step in the wrong direction.

Online advertising has gained so much traction because of its inherent tracking ability. Pageviews are the wrong metric. Any advertiser worth their salt isn’t looking at pageviews, when they write the check to the strib or sign the contract,their looking at ROI. So inflating your pageviews really does nothing for you.

Regarding revenue generation to subsidize content creation…knowing this will probably rub some people the wrong way….why not make some reviews and content link out to an affiliate link? If it were properly disclosed I for one would not be all that bothered.

Also a strib branded creditcard/clubcard that you use to pay your subscription and gets you special discounts at advertisers locations could have been a good play 8-12 years ago. This could have given the strib a much better insight/metric into the revenue they actually drive via advertisements to their advertisers.

One thing I don’t see done on MNSpeak very often is citation of previous threads on similar topics. Pimping previous conversations can be a good thing.

Or, use of related posts plugins can help as well.

Absolutely, Ed. Still trying to get into the flow, but this is on my radar, and I will certainly try to do more of it — if not implement some sort of automated related links function.

Local blogger Doodledee (www.doodledee.com) offered a great workaround for this problem a few months back. Here’s the post: http://bit.ly/By3Dz. Toward the bottom, where he says “Drag this link to your bookmarks bar” — do that. It’s safe and easy and worth it, trust me. Next, go to the Strib site and click on an article — you’ll see the traditional, just-the-first-paragraph-or-two display. BUT, when you click the new “all-strib” button on your bookmark bar, presto, the remainder of the article appears, minus all that clicking nonsense. Don’t thank me, thank Doodledee.

I don’t mind “paging” through an article if the website moves fast.

Thanks, Jack (and Doodledee, of course). Great link.

I maybe wouldn’t mind it so much in the STrib if it weren’t such an obvious ploy for page views. It’s not like the articles are that long. At least at NYtimes.com, I can read a pretty big chunk before I have to click to the next page.

It’s adding insult to injury on top of the auto-refresh, the painful layout, and the mostly (but not entirely) cruddy content.

How different is the practice of paginating web articles vs. paginating a newspaper or magazine hardcopy story? Yes, both force you to peruse more of the publication’s “real estate” and, thus, gives their client’s advertising more eyeballs.

I’m not so much against the idea or practice of paginating as I am against the specific practice of paginating after only two or three paragraphs. PC World is among the worst but the Strib has also done it from it from time to time.

Still, it’s always nice when a Web site does give a reader the option of displaying a story in a single-page format.

@nood do you propose that the newspapers wouldn’t be in this predicament if instead of a fold/pages they had utilized one long scroll…cause if so I highly concur.

btw I am talking about scrolls as in dead sea. for the physical paper…I could care less about the online version.

@ryanl: I’m perfectly happy ratcheting up the pageviews if the article holds my interest … but if the article is longer than 3 paginations online (and I love news sites that do tell me how many pages there are), I will opt to display it “single page” if that option is available.

What’s mind-boggling, in the world of dead-tree publishing, is when an article is not only split (e.g. continued on page 144) but then traverses in reverse (e.g. page 144 leads to page 143, etc.)! That’s happened a couple of times with Mpls-St. Paul Magazine. Then, Hulk get angry!

“I don’t mind “paging” through an article if the website moves fast.”

Problem with the Strib is that they clog it with so many scrpts, that it loads like molasses. At least for me.

I do make use of the print article button to view a story as a sindle page form time to time. And The NYTimes offers both print story and a view as single page buttons.

Kind of related: I really hate when you click on a story headline on the front page of the Strib site, and instead of taking you to the story, it takes you to the front page of another “topic section”, where you then have to hunt for the headline of the story you wanted to read. Almost any flu story will do that to you.

@nood if we went back to scrolls why not go all the way and use Parchment instead of paper.

Oh, heck, ryanl. Why stop there? Let’s bring back Roman numerals and chiseling on stone!

The Strib is too slow; I almost never ever go to that site. Ever.

The slowness is the clincher, but discussion above reminds me I don’t like the measly 2-3 graphs you get to read before going to another page, and you also aren’t shown how many pages there will be.

Not that they plan on addressing this issue or anything, but the Strib has announced a major website redesign (and another 100 jobs cut!)

http://wcco.com/local/100.tribune.cuts.2.1301123.html
http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2009/11/09/13293/amid_job_cuts_star_tribune_announces_major_website_redesign#94-13293

The problem I see with doing this is — sure you get an increase in pageviews — but you are degrading the worth of those pageviews. You have to keep escalating what you’re doing to keep those pageviews coming in order for the ad dollars to keep rolling in. They’re not providing better content. They’re not making things more convenient. They are not driving customers to their site (probably driving people away.) It is clear the Strib doesn’t have a clue on what to do in the online world…

@DouglasG: It’s not just the Strib, though. I like the way The Daily Beast lays out their articles their content, giving you the option of clicking through (to a known number of pages) or displaying it all of the article single-page.

@nood don’t be silly…how is a delivery boy supposed to haul stone tablets on his schwinn?

@douglasG does anyone have a clue. Show me an online publishing network that can create revenue with online content that can compete with the revenue print media used to?

I certainly know they cannot compete with the money print media used to generate from online content. However, this is not the way to go about it. They are attempting to fool their advertisers. It is pure and simple. They jack up the pageviews and take that to their advertisers and say “Look at these pageviews!” If the advertisers buy it, and they do not get the same return, then the Strib has to do something else to convince these advertisers that they are getting their money’s worth. It is just a trick, but does not do anything but annoy users who can find the same content elsewhere. It is lose lose…

@nood don’t be silly…how is a delivery boy supposed to haul stone tablets on his schwinn?

Schwinn? I thought we’d go all the way back to chariots, too! A carrier can haul a couple of dozen tablets that way.

I wrote to former ombudswoman Kate Perry about this a few years ago, and she got back to me with a “What, us?” kind of reply, which pretty much confirmed it. I don’t mind the practice, except when the last click gets you one or two sentences and then – BAM – the article ends. That’s just annoying.

Alright noodleman I see what ya did there.

back to what I believe was the initial thrust of this post? Any suggestions for creating a sustainable business model for online news publishing? Its been a few years since I bought display advertising other than through adwords and about 7 since I sold newspaper advertising but a major cause of advertiser churn back then was the lack of hard target tracking…display advertising on CPM rates for my customers only cut it when things are rockin rolling, when the sheet hits the fan…most of my advertisers wanted hard results…ROI.

So the question becomes how does a newspaper better track results that their content/advertising creates?

That’s the challenge, ryanl. Like inventing the internal combustible engine a decade before someone thought to attach it to a carriage frame and drive it around.

As for tracking … well, how much of your privacy do you value? Or, rather, what’s the value of your privacy? The only truly accurate measure of readership/viewership/listenership would be to implant a tracking device. Then there’d be no weighting, and no averaging. But that still wouldn’t account for the times when I’ll have the TV on but I’m not really watching it.

Well they didn’t get it all wrong.. cars.com and apartments.com and careerbuilder seem to be fairly decent profit centers. The problem is they attempt to recapture lost classified revenue and do little to recapture display advertising revenues.

But it’s true, isn’t it, that classifieds made up a substantial portion of a print newspaper’s profit? Banners ads don’t do nearly as well as do the more classified-like Google ads. And who needs a banner ad to find out what’s on sale anyway at Acme Dry Goods if you already know their web address? (Radio’s going through a similar battle but for listeners. Who needs a radio station when people have so many other, more personal devices available to them … commercial-free.)

Radio survived TV. So did newspapers (but I think they started doing themselves in by trying to copy TV’s focus on a short attention span). TV no doubt will survive the Internet but is already seeing its revenue base being whittled away by online services. The literal “golden years” in mass media are pretty much dead.

The real page view inflation trick is their automatic reloading of the front-page. If you leave your browser open it keeps reloading periodically, which sounds like a convenience feature until you realize it’s why the strib keeps winning national awards for “longest average reader time spent on site for a regional news paper”: when you go to lunch with the Strib in a window you show up in the statistics as someone who was actively engaged for an hour.

From the source:
var reloadTimer = setTimeout(function(){window.location.reload(false);},600000);

This is exactly what I was talking about: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/69613052.html?page=3&c=y